"The setting: a huge abandoned railway workshop  . . .  now the machinery rusts, quietly marking out the place where where blackened hands mopped sweaty brows  . . .  We are led beside one shed from which light and sound escapes, the way marked out with kerosene flares on the ground extending in parallel lines into the night like a track into the netherworld  . . . "
--Peter McCALLUM Sydney Morning Herald 11 March 1997

Opening of the Mouth

Opening of the Mouth, a collaboration between composer Richard BARRETT, installation artist Crow and the ELISION Ensemble, was commissioned by and first performed at the 1997 The Festival of Perth. The performances, involving ten instrumentalists, two singers, conductor and using electronics and tape, occurred in the midst of an installation within a disused foundry of the Midland Railway Workshops, outside Perth.

"Visitors were led like Jews to the gas chambers around the darkened foundry. Inside a dilapidated warehouse they encountered a shattered landscape of rusting machinery, ambiguous film symbology, a disturbing loud electronic soundscape, and most confronting of all, the putrid stench of decaying fish heads which potently conveyed the bloodletting of Nazi-designed genocide. I nearly vomited  . . . "
--Stewart DAWES X-PRESS Magazine 525, 6 March 1997

The work draws its inferences from two sources; one belonging to this century, the poetry of Paul Celan, and another belonging to the early civilisation of ancient Egypt--the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth. This ritual was concerned with the giving of `voice´ to the dead soul so that it could bear witness to the events of its lifetime: a restoration of speech becoming a restoration and recovery of human experience.

Through the words of the artists, witnesses, the poet and through images of the installation and performances, we hope these pages will give some feeling of the form and metaphor of Opening of the Mouth:

Background Foreground Poems by Paul CELAN The Installation The Composition 1997 Festival of Perth Performance scherbentöne  . . .  ausgewirbelt, Sydney An Antenna on the History of ELISION 1998 Brussels/Bremen Performances